Posted on 04/03/2003 10:53:24 AM PST by mrustow
Toogood Reports [Thursday, April 3, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST]
URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/
Early last June or so, I discovered what Bill Quick, himself a major "blogger" who maintains the Daily Pundit, had dubbed "the blogosphere." It was an article in the New York Times, of all places, that informed me about this new cyber-system. What the hey, I'm not embarrassed (well, not overly so) to confess to finding something in the Times.
"Blog" is a contraction of "web log." Since the craze began in response to 911, using newly invented technology which permitted one to turn one's computer screen into a cyber-ticker tape, many blogs were and still are referred to as "warblogs."
Some bloggers, most notably the Brothers Judd, the Daily Pundit, the presently on hiatus Indepundit and Croooow Blog, have been supportive of my work.
Periodically, I do a google search of myself. It's vain, I know. I like to see who is reprinting my articles without permission, or talking about me. In the world of motivation, it's all good. For instance, I have the singular distinction of being the favorite Jewish writer of the National Socialists of Sweden. Not only did the Swedish Nazis re-post an article of mine on black urban crime (which another site had already re-posted without permission), they went to the trouble of translating it into Swedish! How many Jews do you think have received that honor? (I'm not sure the Swedish Nazis KNEW that I was their favorite Jewish author, although I suppose they know now.)
Alan Weberman of the Jewish Defense Organization, who has achieved notoriety by terrorizing Bob Dylan and by defaming scientist Dr. Steven Hatfill, suggests that my position as a 'white supremacist' has something to do with the time he says I spent in the former Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe), which will come as news to my Yiddishe Mama. (See point #18 in Weberman's endless rant.)
Most bloggers I'm familiar with tend to be – as far as I can determine – neo-conservative. "Neo-conservatism," a movement that was founded by Irving Kristol and other early 1940s graduates of the City College of New York, attempts to combine political and cultural conservatism with support for centralized federal power, foreign adventurism, open borders, "civil rights" and the state of Israel.
Some neocons have useful insights – as long as race isn't the issue of the day. Because when it comes to race – e.g., affirmative action – neocons restrict themselves to arguments that were fresh and plausible in 1983, but today are neither.
Typical neocon line: 'Affirmative action harms the self-esteem of its recipients, who have to wonder if anyone will take their accomplishments seriously.' The hell it does – the recipients of affirmative action don't care enough about honest accomplishment to be disturbed about not being taken seriously. Worse than such inaccurate claims is the ignorance – willful or otherwise – such limited arguments betray of contemporary race relations. Already in 1992, I first published a two-part article in my magazine, A Different Drummer, using the term "Jim Snow," to describe the system of apartheid that had grown out of affirmative action.
Establishment neocons will respond to the above, by crying, "Racist!" As Trent Lott can tell you, you can identify a neocon, by the knife he just buried in your back, in order to placate blacks. (But who am I to presume? I've dropped a few "r"s in my day.) But I don't have space at present, to do justice to neo-conservatism, which was once a vital, courageous movement.
But there are also some lefty blogs.
In late December – Trent's Time – I came across two semi-jocular blog references to me as being possibly a major Klansman. (Apparently, I'm the Klan's first Jewish leader, to go along with being the first Jewish leader of the Swedish Nazis.) Both references came from a fellow named Tom Maguire; once on his own blog, and once on the politically correct blog of a Brad de Long. Since no one responded to Maguire's own blog, I'll confine myself to the goings-on at deLong's.
"Does preferential admissions leads to preferential grading at colleges and universities? "Two books [sic], one by Thomas Sowell, who is well known; one by Nicholas Stix, who for all I know is a member of the Klan, reach that conclusion.""Alan Krueger, writing in the NY Times, summarized a study which demonstrates discrimination in hiring....
Maguire mistakenly referred to my series on grade inflation as a book. I should be so lucky. The reference to my possible Klan membership, linked to one of my articles on racial attacks in New York's Central Park. Among multiculturalists, simply noting violent black racism gets one labeled a white supremacist.
De Long's readers tend to be left of Clinton; his most "conservative" reader supported affirmative action. However, since that reader's support was qualified by noting that he was a businessman, and by defending employers who question the quality of a black applicant's academics, another reader called for contacting the feds and having the "conservative" arrested.
"Can anyone figure out where he works and drop a dime to the EEOC, newly-reminded that bigotry really does exist?"
The discussion was blindly supportive of the tendentious study that the Times' Alan Krueger was trying to pawn off on readers. The study, by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, alleged that employers were racist for being less inclined to call an applicant named "Aisha" than one named "Kristen," even though both "applicants" had attended the same college, and graduated with the same grade-point average. Krueger and the study's authors apparently ignored the fact that "Ebony" got call-backs for interviews at a higher frequency than the average white name, even though Ebony is clearly a black name. (The applicants and resumes were all fabricated.) Said Krueger:
"The results are disturbing. Applicants with white-sounding names were 50 percent more likely to be called for interviews than were those with black-sounding names. Interviews were requested for 10.1 percent of applicants with white-sounding names and only 6.7 percent of those with black-sounding names....
"At the low end, the interview-request rate was 2.2 percent for Aisha, 3.8 percent for Keisha and 5.4 percent for Tamika, compared with 9.1 percent for Kenya and Latonya and 10.5 percent for Ebony.
"Only part of this variability reflects chance differences resulting from sampling, although the authors have not been able to find a good explanation [as opposed to racism] for the wide range.""There were significant differences in interview-request rates among the nine names associated with black women, but not among the names within each of the other groups.
I've got it: The authors are from Mars.
Those of us with our feet planted firm on the ground, may recall the black Chicago businessmen whom William Julius Wilson quoted in When Work Disappears, as saying they would never hire young black men, because the latter's unreliability is exceeded only by their surliness.
My first note to Maguire was about the links in his post, which I mistakenly thought were wrong. I then sent him a second e-mail, apologizing for my error. His response follows:
From: "Tom Maguire"
Mr. Stix;
Whoa, you are unnerving me. I have a regrettable tendency to think of published authors as somewhat like celestial beings - floating above the affairs of mere mortals such as myself, and rarely deigning to get involved.
Anyway, I am glad the link thing worked out. I have no idea who you are or what your background is, but I hope you took the mention of a possible "Klan" connection as an attempt to defuse what I imagined to be a likely counter-attack by some of the other commenters in that thread. Sort of a "preemptive overkill" approach.
I actually recycled that argument at my own humble blog as well:
If you have some celestial insight into the truth of this, we would love to hear it.
Happy holidays.
To:
Sent: Wednesday, December 25, 2002 12:03 PM
Subject: Re: Ignore my previous note
http://justoneminute.blogspot.com/2002_12_22_justoneminute_archive.html# 90084125
Regards,
Tom Maguire
The MinuteMan
JustOneMinute.blogspot.com
I immediately wrote and re-wrote a response, which got buried on my virtual desk. Eventually, I found and sent Maguire the following letter on February 9. Since he has never posted or responded to it, I think it is fair to conclude that his offer of dialogue was disingenuous. Maybe those arrogant, "celestial" writers who just ignore everyone, a la V.S. Naipaul, are the smart ones.
Dear Mr. Maguire:
Actually, I took the "Klan" reference as an instance of you pandering to your readers.
At first, I thought I'd write a letter, then decided that anything I'd put in a long letter could just as well fill out a column, since writings I intend as letters often end up as columns. But I have a lot of unfinished mss. backed up, and don't know if this column will happen. I could waste every day of my life refuting lies the Times tells, but have of late restricted myself to about once a month. It's a tedious business, but someone has to do it.
The Alan Krueger article is pathetic. I'm going to ignore the scientific sounding jargon, which impresses me about as much as someone informing me he bought balsamic vinegar.
The biggest fallacy of the study, as Krueger represents it, is the assumption that a black GPA of 3.0 is equal to a white GPA of 3.0. As anyone who has worked in, or studied higher ed during the past thirty years knows, black students are graded by much lower standards than their white classmates. The term for this is "affirmative grading." The late, liberal Harvard sociologist, David Riesman, committed the term to print in 1980 (see Thomas Sowell's Inside American Education: The Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas.)
Instructors typically pass failing black students in order to avoid recriminations, and (in the case of untenured faculty, which means the majority) possibly losing their jobs. I once flunked a black student who had not completed a single one of her ten writing assignments in a remedial writing class, and who engaged in rampant absenteeism (my limit was four absences; she missed at least ten classes). She appealed over my head, and got the grade she demanded.
At another school, I passed a young black man whom I should have failed. (He was a "D" student, but a "C" was required to pass.) He had a severe dyslexia problem, and his sentences would sometimes have more misspellings than words. I took him to the Office of Disability Services. Later, when we went back to the office together, the white woman who had seen my student announced to us that there was "nothing wrong" with him, in such a way as to clearly suggest that I was the one with a problem. As I was to discover at that predominantly black school, "Disability Services" was yet another affirmative action beachhead, which existed only to exclude as many students as possible from having to meet academic requirements, and to harass instructors.
Another factor inflating black students' grades is the increasing frequency of their bloating their GPAs with intellectually anemic black studies courses, where blacks are given "A"s, provided they have a pulse.
What no one will dare talk about is the "trash factor" in naming. Many blacks see certain names – "Aisha," "Lakeisha," "Shiniqua," etc. – as having trashy associations, based on the sort of people who frequently give their kids such names. Granted, that's a crude and inaccurate method of selection, since such names are not exclusively chosen by trashy parents, but you cannot deride whites as "racist" for applying the same standards as the blacks whom one gives a pass. (Oops, I just assumed some knowledge of actual black practices. My mistake.) In 1989, when I was a foster-care worker, I was in the home in the projects of a black foster mother named Martha. Seeing me looking at the framed photograph of her adopted son, she said, "That's James." Observing my surprised expression at the Anglo-Saxon name, Martha explained, "None of that Shiniqua s--t." (Note: Martha did not speak that way around the children.)
(P.S. On March 10, when Whoopi Goldberg guest hosted for an ailing David Letterman on The Late Show, in her monologue, she made fun of Letterman's illness, an affliction commonly known as the "shingles": (paraphrasing) 'Dave got that from Shiniqua, on the street.' It was no accident, that Goldberg used the name "Shiniqua.")
Most of Brad deLong's readers screamed "racism" at any poster who doubted black college graduates' academic credentials. Those posters are either incredibly dishonest or incredibly ignorant of the very topic on which they have such passionate views.
Indeed, if I took them seriously, I'd wonder what planet they are living on. People who make claims such as: 1. 'Blacks admitted to college under affirmative action must nevertheless meet the same academic standards as whites'; and 2. 'Blacks are typically held back in society due to white racism,' display a level of dishonesty that would be obscene in 1982. These are the kind of people who BRAG about relying on the New York Times or Washington Post or Newsday or the Los Angeles Times for information.
Affirmative action has long since expanded into the system of apartheid I call Jim Snow. Jim Snow encompasses large urban businesses, agencies, and schools that will not hire white staffers, no matter how qualified (or will hire them, but let racist black employees terrorize them), and daily black-on-white racial attacks – now even in Midtown Manhattan during rush hour – that police and prosecutors refuse to do anything about.
There is also a strong class warfare component to Jim Snow. In majority white cities (which New York still is, the media notwithstanding, since 50% of Hispanics are white), to succeed, such apartheid requires the support of white elites. Those elites don't mind if qualified, working-class and lower-middle-class whites are professionally and legally disenfranchised, as long as they and theirs are assured top-level jobs and the protection of the laws. And so, parallel universes exist. In the propaganda universe, elites decry the difficulties black professional men allegedly have getting a taxi in Manhattan. In the real universe, however, those same elites make damned sure that they ride in taxis after dark, so as to avoid sharing subway cars with black men. And "those same elites" include the indignant black professional men. Subways are for "losers," who may be mugged at will, and who are shown contempt by taxicab-riding prosecutors.
The foregoing remarks on class warfare apply, based on my experience, to well-to-do urban socialists and conservatives alike.
There, I ended up writing a column-length letter, anyway.
I have no problem with your posting this letter in its entirety – but only if you post it along with your own, complete letter. Fair is fair.
With best holiday wishes,
Nicholas Stix
To comment on this article or express your opinion directly to the author, you are invited to e-mail Nicholas at adddda@earthlink.net .
~& yea I read the whole, fabulous piece.
...twice.
Great observation by Mr. Stix. Thanks for posting this mrustow - I found it to be a pleasurable read!
If you wanted suspects in the athrax attack, there they are, and given the way this Weberman guy struggles to blame somebody else, it's likely that we can parse all of that nonsense and identify all the relevant pieces of information HE LEFT OUT. Those will target his friends. They may implicate him before it's over.
And, like Mr. Stix...I'm not a racist. Just a realist.
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